When people, especially politicians, talk about the future, they often refer to the present as working towards a more perfected version of future. Their agendas are directly associated with this more perfected reality of the future. The futurist sociologist Jean Baudrillard however sees this as a fallacy. He believes the intrinsic state of human nature, the completion and perfection of knowledge as one that will always lead to us being incomplete and without our most basic need as the search for truth and understanding as unfulfilled. This essay explores those ramifications 50-100 years in the future.
Baudrillard believed that words as signs say more about their users then they do about actual intrinsic realities of the referent. He saw as objects as instead of saying what something is as saying what it is not.
Wittgenstein in his influential work Philosophical Investigations in interpreting a passage of Augustine’s confessions saw a common definition of language as such: “the individual words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such namesEvery word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with a word. It is the object for which the word stands for.” (Wittgenstein, 2). Wittgenstein reaches farther than this simple definition of language and goes further by realizing that language “consists in moving objects” that have certain rules that guide their use and function. His view of language was defined by their rules of use and allowed for a flexibility of language in which different “language games” or systems adhered to corresponding rules of use.
Frege’s essay On Sense and Reference begins by elucidating what are notions so obvious and central to the use of language is hardly seems appropriate to offer an explanation for them. He points out the cognitive value of signs (by means of their shape) are equal in the mind. A difference (a cognitive difference in signs) can only arise if the mode of presentations of the signs changes (37). Then for Frege, signs all share equal significance and this equality is altered only in a variance of a particular signs occurrence.
Frege then goes on to distinguish between a signs sense and reference. For Frege Having a sense does not necessarily assure that a sign has a reference. Sense possesses an adjective nature which describes a situation of an object but does not necessarily describe or give indication of a particular (or for that matter general) object being referred to.
He uses the example of morning star and evening star, while both of these signs are refereeing to Venus, the sense of each reference is different while the object being referred to stays the same. It is the context in which evening and morning occur in describing the star that changes the sense while the reference must remain constant with regard to the use of the language. In language there are difference signs that have the same object as a reference point and likewise different ways of expressing a sense of an object. Morning Star, Evening Star, The Bright Orange Star, The First Star To Appear at Night, The Last Star To Disappear Before Day, and The Star That Touches the Edge of the Horizon, may all have the same reference point of Venus but they all appear under a different context guise in the language and therefore have a different sense. Frege points out also that grasping of sense does not ensure a reference point since sense only speaks of the context of a sign and not the sign itself.
Baudrillard believed that the excesses amount of sings drifting around in the late 20th century to mean that a global society instead of adding more clarity to life on earth and reality had caused an effacement of reality. He believed neither in liberal or Marcist utopias could be possible.
A lot of his work which centered on mass medias portrayal of events meant that the global world rather than sharing in their mutual accomplishments of learning, now were first to share in widespread despair. We see this today in the media. People complain that there seems to be a surfeit of bad news in the media. Tragedies that happened thousands of miles away, be them shootings or wars or murders, are now being relatyed to people simultaneously all over the world. Unlike Marx who believed that consumption was the essence of society, Baudrillard believed that consumption was the fundamental driver. He believed that human needs were artificle and flexible—imposed upon humankind by arbitrary habits of society. (Baudrillard, 9).
Objects four Baudrillard had four functions: functional, exchange, symbolic, and sign. The nature of social relationships is decided by the forms of communication that a society refers to. Today’s communication, which includes social media, email, and many instand menas are references with to referents, what Braudrillard calls a hyper reality. In a sense, we are already to this “Brave New World” of communication.
The future we are moving towards under this perspective is not a more perfected version of the present day, but one in which we are lost further in a jungle of our own making. People avoid the immediate reality unfolding around them and instead trade it for the instant, and easy form of communications. Politicians no longer believe in a sort of utopia that a society can achieve, but are still using the means to work towards an empty end.
In the hyper reality, the media mediates continues to connect to world to others suffering, while bringing nothing positive to people’s door step. People, Baudrillard believes, have always been lost, but are inevitably going deeper into a realm where reality is convoluted and saturated with means and reference, but devoid of meaning, outcomes and ends.
His view leads to a rather dark system of reality. While a lot of his thought remains true, his viewpoint is narrow in that he sees his thinking as a zero sum game. It is possible to keep his view in mind, and see it as instrumental in informing truth, but without going off the deep end of thinking this is an inevitable state of affairs for the future world whose beginnings are unfolding all around us in the present day.
Works Cited:
Baudrillard, Jean. "Jean Baudrillard- Two Essays ("Simulacra and Science Fiction" and "Ballard's Crash")." DePauw University. Version #55 = Volume 18, Part 3. Science Fiction Studies, n.d. Web. 10 June 1991. <http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5Dummett, Michael. Frege. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. Print.
Stern, David G. 2004. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: An introduction. Cambridge University Press. Pg 2.
